I have had a few technical thoughts about the iPhone 4 antenna and I was wondering what other people thought of them.
The issue of touching the lower left corner across the gap seems to be one of detuning rather than attenuation. There has been work done using RF MEMS to actively tune the antennas. Most of the work seems to be about transmit but I would think the antenna could be tuned for recieve as well.
There is a company WiSpry that is going to production with some RF MEMS devices soon - see http://www.wispry.com/newsmedia_pressrelease_click.php?id=123 "... WiSprys current generation of tunable impedance matching products, slated for production with a major tier-one OEM this fall ...". They also won the Smart Antenna Front End (SAFE) Project - http://www.wispry.com/newsmedia_pressrelease_click.php?id=124 -which includes Infineon, who is the baseband/RF supplier for iPhones. Is WiSpry going to be a future supplier to Apple for impedance matching and RF Front Ends? If Apple knew about the antenna detuning issue for a while, possible 2 years has been suggested, could this be the solution they have been working on?
Just recently Digitimes reported "The CDMA iPhone's back plate will be forged from metal materials and will feature an integrated antenna, according to Digitimes Research." One common solution for cell phone antenna detuning is to add antenna diversity - using the best of two antennas since it is unlikely both antennas would be touched in a way that both would get detuned. Could adding an antenna to the back plate be a fix for detuning on both the GSM and a future CDMA iPhone and eventually a LTE iPhone?
I would love to hear what other people think of these thought.
The issue of touching the lower left corner across the gap seems to be one of detuning rather than attenuation. There has been work done using RF MEMS to actively tune the antennas. Most of the work seems to be about transmit but I would think the antenna could be tuned for recieve as well.
There is a company WiSpry that is going to production with some RF MEMS devices soon - see http://www.wispry.com/newsmedia_pressrelease_click.php?id=123 "... WiSprys current generation of tunable impedance matching products, slated for production with a major tier-one OEM this fall ...". They also won the Smart Antenna Front End (SAFE) Project - http://www.wispry.com/newsmedia_pressrelease_click.php?id=124 -which includes Infineon, who is the baseband/RF supplier for iPhones. Is WiSpry going to be a future supplier to Apple for impedance matching and RF Front Ends? If Apple knew about the antenna detuning issue for a while, possible 2 years has been suggested, could this be the solution they have been working on?
Just recently Digitimes reported "The CDMA iPhone's back plate will be forged from metal materials and will feature an integrated antenna, according to Digitimes Research." One common solution for cell phone antenna detuning is to add antenna diversity - using the best of two antennas since it is unlikely both antennas would be touched in a way that both would get detuned. Could adding an antenna to the back plate be a fix for detuning on both the GSM and a future CDMA iPhone and eventually a LTE iPhone?
I would love to hear what other people think of these thought.